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Polaroid Abandons Instant Photography

In happier times: Polaroid’s 1970s-80s television ads featuring James Garner and Mariette Hartley wisecracking and needling one another were widely admired and imitated.

It was a wonder in its time: A camera that spat out photos that developed themselves in a few minutes as you watched. You got to see them where and when you took them, not a week later when the prints came back from the drugstore.

But in a day when nearly every cellphone has a digital camera in it, “instant” photography long ago stopped being instant enough for most people. So today, the inevitable end of an era came: Polaroid is getting out of the Polaroid business.

The company, which stopped making instant cameras for consumers a year ago and for commercial use a year before that, said today that as soon as it had enough instant film manufactured to last it through 2009, it would stop making that, too. Three plants that make large-format instant film will close by the end of the quarter, and two that make consumer film packets will be shut by the end of the year, Bloomberg News reports.

The company, which will concentrate on digital cameras and printers, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2001 and was acquired by a private investment company in 2005. It started in 1937 making polarized lenses for scientific and military applications, and introduced its first instant camera in 1948.

The Lede remembers fondly how magical it was to watch the image gradually manifest itself from the chemical murk right there in your hand. But truth be told, the Lede’s own scuffed Polaroid SX-70 camera, which used to get regular use in all manner of situations, from producing a quick step-by-step primer on how to do the Ickey Shuffle to documenting a problem with a house he was buying that cropped up the day before the closing, hasn’t come out of its cabinet drawer in years.

Loyal users take heart, though — Polaroid said it would happily license the technology to other manufacturers should they want to go on supplying the niche market with film after 2009.

Polariod had a great run, instant pictures were a miracle in their day. But in the end the pictures were not very good, could not easily be reprinted, and we’ve all had a burn or two from the developer leaking out. Polariod was great but now joins the telegraph, the record player, and the dial telephone in the dust bins of history. Thank You Mr Land.

Truly a sad day for a once great company and one of the world’s most powerful brands. They weren’t just the point and shoot at a party people. Police departments, the DMV, hospitals, morgues, professional photographers testing expensive film would always shoot a 4X5 polaroid to study a shot. Artists and photographers played with the process, morphing matter into art all their own.

LOL .. I hear that! I went out and bought a Polaroid circa 1986, the day I got a short note from my corner drugstore .. “Dear customer: We are returning your negatives. We regret the inconvenience, but Walgreens does not print photos from negatives of that nature”. How hilarious it was, in this day & age when even a conservative corporation like Marriott makes huge profits from showing pornographic movies in its hotel rooms, that once some companies made a holy decision to tsk tsk about morality while turning away business.

Edwin Land, the inventor of polaroid film, was a genius. The story goes his young daughter asked him why people had to wait (to be processed) for photos. His accomplishments are too numerable to list here. Google his name and learn. He said his greatest feat was being put on Nixon’s enemy list. I’m surprised their film division held on this long.

As a long time film photographer, and the owner of two “antique” Polaroid cameras, I’m sad.

Sure, digital photography is great, but there was something romantic about a photographic darkroom (if you didn’t have to spend all day in there smelling the chemicals), and directly manipulating with my hands a beam of light streaming from the enlarger to the photographic paper. “holding back” and “burning-in” portions of a picture.

Some of my earliest memories are of loading cut 4″x5″ sheet film into the film holders used with Kodak “Speed Graphic” cameras. Doing this in the dark took some skill.

Custom mixing developers, and “pushing” film speed was fun. I used to “push” film by 50-100x, so I could do short exposure astrophotography (motor-guided, synchronized tripods cost a fortune at the time).

I still routinely use Polaroid cameras. They are widely used among fashion photographers to check composition, etc., before using the large format camera. Better, they’re great first cameras for kids — digital doesn’t compare with instant. And the body of the camera was so inexpensive that you could just experiment.

Film is dead. Instant film is dead. It was inevitable.
There will be yet more unusable cameras for the junk yard. As a former professional photographer, I used polaroid instant proofing material for years, and I was thankful for it’s convenience at the time. I haven’t used my 4×5 or 2 1/4″ cameras in years. The film is too expensive, and it is getting more difficult to find labs that will process any film. It took one of my first polaroid photos as a child(with a Polaroid Swinger–B&W) off my black and white Tv screen when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. I still have the photo. It is a great keepsake.

Too bad – the polaroid still makes kids marvel, and still gives a picture much faster and with less fuss than shooting digital and somehow getting the image to a printer… nothing like taking the shot, listening to the whirring sound, and handing the apparently blank film to a little person not yet familiar with the magic of the format.

I remember as a kid how excited we all were to take pictures of ourselves and eagerly wait for them to develop. We got so into it, we started taking pictures of nothing (a tree, a foot, the ground) just for the sheer joy of seeing a picture appear. Good times.

Wouldn’t it be neat if Apple would develop an IPhone with an instant camera which would eject a wallet sized hard copy on demand for either the sender or the recipient or both? Hey, Steve (Jobs) don’t forget to remember me if you ever decide to do it.

Coming from a Kodak family…Turns out that the Polaroid lawsuit forcing them to stop production of instant film/cameras was a good thing.
Now, if they had only shifted directly to digital instead of trying ADVANTIX…

It may make sense for Polaroid to stop manufacturing instant film – but it doesn’t for Polaroid to decline to license its patents, or sell its plant and equipment, to other entrepreneurs who might attempt to make a market out of furnishing their unique still photo film the the hundreds of thousands who still own functioning Polaroid instant cameras and would like to continue using them.

Internet access and new market venues like eBay or Half.com, or even the use of a search engine, make it possible to search successfully for exotic parts – sometimes used – in mere seconds.

Those same searches before the internet might take days, and sometimes would turn up nothing for a consumer. This innovative effect is positive, not least because it may open new opportunities to supply needs profitably which were not practical a decade ago.

It is also positive because, if consumers continue to use less-than-state-of-the-art consumer goods (like Polaroid cameras) with enjoyment, waste and annoyance derived from throwing away usable products — and replacing them with ones consumers would be less satified with – are eliminated.

Land was beyond genius. He was years ahead of everyone else. There’s a street in Cambridge named after him. Read his biography. It’s a shame the company didn’t stick to its R&D roots and continue to innovate in optics. Steve Benton did a lot of his groundbreaking work in holography at Polaroid before moving on to the MIT Media Lab. Alas, Polaroid bet all its money on instant film, which won big in the short term but has been overtaken.

Responding to #2, the “dust bins of history” are not truly dust bins at all. All of those things listed have become novelty, specialized, revered and still utilitized by those sensitive enough to appreciate the tactile experience they provide. Vinyl records continue to be produced,spun, mixed and scratched, and are a highly desired listening format. If I truly value an new artist’s work, I go out of my to get my hands on their record edition. You can’t beat that material sensation and the nice sized album art. It’s the same with polaroids. Nothing beats the nostalgic effect of the polaroid flash and fuzz. It’s not pixel perfect, but it’s full of that ugly instant moment. Curious to see who buys the license. . .

Well, Fuji is still producing fine medium format instant film of the peel apart variety, and I hope they will continue to do so for many years. My business depends on this film. Jason – //www.wolfindustryconversions.com

the main difference between Polaroids and digital photographs is that Polaroids were instantly born into the real world! most of digital photography NEVER exists in the real world, but only in the data ‘ether’.

i have hundreds of Polaroids of other peoples families that i’ve found in thrift stores/yard sales over the years simply because Polaroids are physically tough even when no longer meaningful for the reasons they were taken. they’re just still around, and they have a distinct physical presence: you’re holding the object the person who took the Polaroid held (and their family and friends).

only photographs that exist in the real world can have this quality, to be physical, to be more than data. to exist physically is not to be necessarily meaningful, but it is one of the qualities that can contribute to something being meaningful. Polaroids, no matter their quality as images, were always at least there to hold. like the people in them.

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The Lede is a blog that remixes national and international news stories -- adding information gleaned from the Web or gathered through original reporting -- to supplement articles in The New York Times and draw readers in to the global conversation about the news taking place online.

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